Nerissa Ho

Feeling the world: From emotions to thoughts and behaviours

This option will explore views from different emotion theories to understand the nature of feelings: whether they are primarily emotional experiences or cognitive states of consciousness. We argue that feelings are not only direct translations of external stimulations, but also depend on interoception and high-level cognitive processing. Indeed, feeling is closely related to the concept of the self and consciousness, therefore, is likely to be reflected by our thought patterns that represent the information processed by human cognition.

By exploring the interplay of emotion, thought and behaviour, we examine how ongoing thought patterns can be utilized for examining emotional experiences and how this method can be adopted for clinical diagnosis of psychopathologies.

This option will have five 2-hours interactive classes consisting of lectures and small class activities for group discussions and/or self-reflections. Students are encouraged to do some readings and preparations beforehand.

Readings

All references relevant to each lecture will be listed at the end of the corresponding lecture materials. You are encouraged to read these papers to gain better understanding of the topics discussed. Followings are some indicative readings for each lecture.

Lecture 1:

Joseph E. LeDoux, Richard Brown. (2017). A higher-order theory of emotional consciousness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201619316 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1619316114

Lecture 2:

Critchley, H. D., & Garfinkel, S. N. (2017). Interoception and emotion. Current opinion in psychology, 17, 7-14.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, 1-23.

Lecture 3:

Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2015). The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 487-518.

Lecture 4:

Ruby, F. J., Smallwood, J., Engen, H., & Singer, T. (2013). How self-generated thought shapes mood—the relation between mind-wandering and mood depends on the socio-temporal content of thoughts. PloS one, 8(10), e77554.

Lecture 5:

Andrews‐Hanna, J. R., Smallwood, J., & Spreng, R. N. (2014). The default network and self‐generated thought: Component processes, dynamic control, and clinical relevance. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1316(1), 29-52.